Undergraduate Courses

I have taught a variety of general linguistics courses and courses about phonetics and phonology. At the University of Toronto, I have taught the following courses:

LIN101 Introduction to Linguistics: Sound Structure

This is a first year introductory course for linguistics minors and majors. Would you like to learn more about linguistics? You should take this course with me in Fall 2016!

LIN299 Sound Patterns in Language

This is a second year course in phonology. The course focuses heavily on data analysis using rules and features. You can check out the syllabus here.

LIN322 Phonological Theory

This is an advanced course in phonology. The course contrasts rule-based phonological theory with Optimality Theory. The focus of this course is theoretical; we look at various predictions that Optimality Theory makes. You can check out the syllabus here.

Teaching

What to expect

Interested in taking a course with me? I look forward to seeing you in the classroom. In my teaching, I try to accommodate every student. I work hard to get as much of in class engagement as possible. In my large enrollment courses, I use iClickers for instant feedback. In my class, I combine classic lectures with group work, inverted classroom, in-class polling, and instant feedback. All my classes have an online component that allows students to dig deeper in the material on their own.

Here is what some of my past students have said.

Thank you so much for your guidance in this semester again! You have given a great deal of help and assistance for all of us in class. [Email]

I definitely enjoyed the course more than I thought. The abstractness of phonology is beyond the theories and methods I'm used to learning. Through my experience, as well as talking to students who took phonology with other professors, I've learned that I was very fortunate that you taught this class. The take home message: Please keep teaching this course. : ) [Email]

I wanted to say that you're a great prof and your genuine desire to help students understand the material really comes through in your lectures. [...] You've completely changed my outlook on phonology; who knew it could be so interesting? [Email]

I know many people get temporary crushes on profs. This time I got a big one. I was in LIN229 Phonology for Winter 2014, and I still recall this prof from time to time and wonder how he's doing. Totally stalked him on Facebook, Linkedin, his personal website and Google images. But all I did was just search him up, find out that he's like 35 and is from Slovenia, and and his specialty seems to be Slavic languages.
This feeling is nothing sexual and I definitely don't have the will or the guts to go up and talk to him on a personal level (come on, he seems REALLY smart and I only minor in Linguistics, and I don't even know what I should say or talk about with profs). I know I'll just remain a secret admirer. Never thought a bald guy could be so charming, effusing so much amazingness. Nice, wonderful personality, best smile I've ever seen. So cute adorable like he makes my heart warm. He could totally be my muse for poetry. Going to your office hours was so exciting, Peter Jurgec, you're the best! [U of T Confessions]

Peter is an excellent professor. He is very organized. The lecture slides were very helpful. He was always willing to answer questions. Overall he is a really nice guy who is trying to help us learn. [Winter 2016 Evaluations]

Prof. Jurgec is not only welcoming, understanding, and helpful, he is humble and always looks for ways to improve the quality of his classes. He is an angel of UofT and I hope nothing bad ever happens to him. [Winter 2016 Evaluations]

The professor was very organized, clear on assignements and gave a lot of feedback. He genuinely cared about his teaching and wants to improve. It was great that he posted lectures, assignments and additional materials on time, which gave me enough time to study. Really appreciated the weighting scale of the whole course--less pressure off of formal evaluation (exam and midterms were weighted the least as possible). Also really appreciated that fact we can bring in 2 double sided cheat sheets to our tests--this took a lot of stress off of studying and could focus on understanding the material rather than memorizing. [Winter 2016 Evaluations]

I think Professor Jurgec is honestly one of the best teachers I've ever had. Unlike some profs you can tell do not want to be there, he actually strives to make the course better for us. The slides provided in lecture are comprehensive, and easy to follow back after the class. It also helps that you can see professor Jurgec actually enjoys the material and gets excited to teach. I found all of the tests and homework to be very fair and he doesn't surprise us with material we wouldn't expect. [Winter 2016 Evaluations]

Peter is a fantastic professor and I thoroughly enjoyed his lectures. He made the course entertaining and pleasant. [Fall 2015 Evaluations]

This course was wonderfully organized with fair assignments that were challenging but really helped me understand the concepts covered in lecture. Professor Jurgec is very patient and clear and his course was very condusive to my learning experience. Should there be a 400-level course in phonology I would not hesitate to take it. [Fall 2015 Evaluations]

One of the best teachers in linguistics at U of T. Peter has a good understanding of what students know and don't know and when he is uncertain, he asks!
He made a good effort to make sure we gained the knowledge we needed and used new methods to keep things interesting. [Fall 2015 Evaluations]

Jurgec is incredibly enthusiastic about the material and the course, and encouraged students in the course to adopt the same level of enthusiasm that he had. He worked hard to make sure the assignments were appropriately challenging and relevant to the material discussed in lecture. [Fall 2015 Evaluations]